Could you give a rough estimate of how important stamina is going to be in general compated to the defensive stat prio you posted?
Also how far down the list is agility going to be.. Are we never going to be gemming for it or?

Hmm, thank you for your response, Arielle. Guess I'll have to think on it. Wasn't in love with the overall changes but hard to give up the class I've played for nearly 8 years. Was hoping the separation of cat and bear specs would finally break the druid = ot mentality though

Guardians have the lowest barrier to swapping specs. That being said, most (if not all) of the encounters in T14 are 2-tank. I don't have specifics (damn raid testing during work hours), but perhaps someone else can shed additional light on this.

Originally Posted by MihmetCrido

Could you give a rough estimate of how important stamina is going to be in general compated to the defensive stat prio you posted?
Also how far down the list is agility going to be.. Are we never going to be gemming for it or?

Stamina provides 0 mitigation benefit. It's still the single best stat for EH, which you will of course need a certain amount of depending on the encounter/difficulty/healers/raid etc. I doubt it'll be a big deal for normal modes, but I expect it'll be much more popular for heroic modes. Especially pre-nerf/heroic gear.

just wanted to add: if you use Faerie Swarm, the tooltip doesnt say anything about it being able to reset mangle anymore, but it actually still does this. i just tested it myself and still works with the talent

your forums have problems? I try a lot of time for registrer but cant because have problem with password.

My question is , why you think Agility is still primary stat ? I dont say its bad , but i think stamina is more important in mop.All in this game need balance, if have 90% agility and only 10% stamina for example , is bad ( my opinion) and if have 90% stamina and 10% agility , is bad too.But i think in mop need more stamina vs agility , because Savage Defense mechanics provide a lot of dodge, and agility give less dodge.And the other point is cap mastery. We will possible that ? or still reforge dodge?

3. AoE tanking, how bad is it? I've seen a few people complaining about this as well. I admit I didn't do a lot with my Bear on beta but from what I did, it didn't seem to be problematic in MoP dungeons.

Originally Posted by Arielle

It's just a matter of making sure you are always autoattacking something. Sometimes this can be a problem if you tab target. I've personally have not had issues, but it's not unforeseeable that someone would run into one.

I highly recommend that one create macros for both Swipe and Thrash that include the following two lines:/targetenemy [help] [dead] [noexists]
/startattack

this will help abilities like Swipe to function more smoothly in combat and it will also help you maintain constant auto-attack up time which is crucial for maintaining rage generation. just make sure AoE clusters are standing in front of you and not 'around' you.

Post-5.0.4, how do the 130 Agility enchant and Windwalk stack up for Guardians? Trying to decide if I should burn the enchantment mats to put Windwalk on my Kiril...

---------- Post added 2012-09-13 at 04:24 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Phugit

When we have 60+ rages are we always going to pop SD? Or is it more situational?

In the rare fight versus a boss with a weak melee attack but a ton of magic damage, it might be preferable to pool rage to drop massive Frenzied Regen heals after a big nuke. Especially when the timing of that nuke is predictable.

Post-5.0.4, how do the 130 Agility enchant and Windwalk stack up for Guardians? Trying to decide if I should burn the enchantment mats to put Windwalk on my Kiril...

With less than 2 weeks left the difference is so small its not really worth it to change alot of stuff

Originally Posted by Phugit

When we have 60+ rages are we always going to pop SD? Or is it more situational?

This comes down to knowing the fight, take Warmaster for example while you always want to dodge attacks ensuring you have a Savage Defense charge available for when he Devastates to add the armor debuff giving you the best chance to avoid the debuff is best. Also like Kaeth said on a fight like Yor Sahj where it is mostly magic damage you wouldnt loose anything taking SD off your bars and dumping everything into FR, of course this means you also have to be aware of your stacks during purple phases.

He's not at 72% right now. I don't think your friend did the DR calculation on armor for combat vs higher level mobs.

Hi, first of all thank you for a very nice guide. However, it feels like this response is a bit asinine. Right now, the armor cap is '75%', which according to you means that our actual damagereduction against a level 88(soon to be 93) is lower than that, lets say 70% just because it's a nice round number.

So, in what way is this new madeup 70% not the cap? Your character gets no benefit for armor above the armor required to get the nominal 75% reduction, correct? On live right now, with BoMight and mastery gear/reforges, I can reach a cap where more mastery no longer increases my damage reduction. According to the character sheet it's 75%, according to you it's something less than that, nevertheless this 'cap' is achievable in BiS gear, and I dont see why you wouldnt be able to reproduce this in MoP with heroic gear from T15/T16 etc, especially if the gear is masery heavy (currenty bear gear has close to no mastery baseline).

With less than 2 weeks left the difference is so small its not really worth it to change alot of stuff

My druid is a 525 enchanter, and I have piles of enchantment mats in the bank. I just wanted to confirm that Windwalk was actually an upgrade in the present content and that I wouldn't be nerfing myself to use it. I should add that I am a Guardian and Resto druid, so the weapon does not perform double duty for cat dps. Tankiness is my only concern.

This comes down to knowing the fight, take Warmaster for example while you always want to dodge attacks ensuring you have a Savage Defense charge available for when he Devastates to add the armor debuff giving you the best chance to avoid the debuff is best.

Thanks, hadn't thought of that one! Those pesky charges on SD do tend to punish you for blindly pursuing maximum uptime in a fight with a predictable melee debuff or avoidable big hit.

---------- Post added 2012-09-13 at 04:48 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Dainwork

So, in what way is this new madeup 70% not the cap?

Because 75% is the cap for armor mitigation when incoming damage is calculated. It doesn't just stop scaling versus level-86-to-88 targets when the character sheet says you're at 75% versus level-85's.

The character panel should really be updated to give a level-by-level breakdown of your armor mitigation the same way it has displayed hit and expertise breakdowns since the start of Cata.

you need 400 critrating for 1% as bear and only 340 rating for 1% hit/expertise on lvl 90
when you crit you get 15 rage --> +8/8,5 rage
when you hit you get 7 or 6,5 rage + you have a chance to refresh mangle cd (wich you don't have when you miss)
setting aside that a missed aggro style at start can kill people

isn't hit/expertise better for rage than crit?

so like dodge/mastery/hit+expertise/crit/haste for values
wich in 90% of the cases only tells us the worst stat to reforge into dodge (since we still reforge dodge on every item -,-)

you need 400 critrating for 1% as bear and only 340 rating for 1% hit/expertise on lvl 90
when you crit you get 15 rage --> +8/8,5 rage
when you hit you get 7 or 6,5 rage + you have a chance to refresh mangle cd (wich you don't have when you miss)
setting aside that a missed aggro style at start can kill people

isn't hit/expertise better for rage than crit?

so like dodge/mastery/hit+expertise/crit/haste for values
wich in 90% of the cases only tells us the worst stat to reforge into dodge (since we still reforge dodge on every item -,-)

What i have done on live for now is Hit/Exp-Dodge cap>Dodge>Mastery>Crit>Haste

I have plenty of rage to work with when needed most of the time, will also do the same with MoP.

Assuming no hit or expertise at all, each autoattack and mangle has a 77.5% chance to hit. Additional hit/expertise scales linearly until you reach a 100% chance to hit. Naked, with no hit/expertise at all, your average rage per autoattack is 8.45, and mangle is either 3.88 or 5.43 with Soul of the Forest. Each additional 1% hit/expertise (until you hit their respective caps) increases average autoattack rage by 0.11 (0.000321 per rating point) and mangle rage by 0.05 (0.000147 per rating point) or 0.07 (0.000206 per rating point) w/SotF.

Crits on autoattacks and mangles give an additional 15 rage. Crit scales linearly until it bumps into miss/dodge/parry on the hit table, which has been an unobtainable level of crit chance since the beginning of Cataclysm. Regardless of your current crit chance, each additional 1% of crit chance is equal to 0.15 more average rage per autoattack and mangle before accounting for missed attacks.

At the no-hit/no-expertise level of 77.5%, that average rage per 1% crit chance is reduced to 0.12, or 0.000291 rage gained per point of crit rating with no hit/expertise rating.

Over a 1-minute time span with no haste, a bear autoattacks 24 times and mangles an average of 12.5 times.

With no crit, that's 0.009542 more rage per minute per point of hit/expertise rating (0.010279 with SotF).

With no hit/expertise, that's 0.010607 more rage per minute per point of crit rating.

I assume there should be breakpoints where stacking enough crit makes another point of hit/expertise more valuable than another point of crit, and vice versa. But in general, a point of crit rating increases your average rage generation more than a point of hit/expertise rating, even if you have none of the latter.

But hit and expertise rating do result in less spiky rage generation, so I'm in no way condoning reforging all of your hit and expertise to crit for higher theoretical rage generation along with a higher chance of being royally owned by bad luck...

My druid is a 525 enchanter, and I have piles of enchantment mats in the bank. I just wanted to confirm that Windwalk was actually an upgrade in the present content and that I wouldn't be nerfing myself to use it. I should add that I am a Guardian and Resto druid, so the weapon does not perform double duty for cat dps. Tankiness is my only concern.

Windwalk was better than +130 agi by a fair amount for tanking before 5.0 according to Rawr. I'm sure it's even more so now. I still use the +130 agi though because I like the enchant animation better :P

For anyone that uses DroodFocus http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/droodfocus Meranannon has finished the savage defense module giving us a movable "ComboPoint" bar that tracks Stacks, Stack CD's, and availability due to rage.

Green - Stack Available and 60 rage
Red - Stack Available and < 60 rage
Grey - Stack on CD
Sweep timer for the 9 second recharge will show on the first stack to come off CD